West Coast, New Zealand

Westport is the start of the south island's west coast road, apparently a rival to Oz's Great Ocean Road! The town itself is small, with very little to do! Becky and I had a date organised, but were very disappointed to find out there were no nice restaurants and the cinema had fallen down! We spent the night and made our move on down the coast the next morning.

The main attraction between Westport and Greymouth is the 'pancake rocks' at Punakaiki. Standing a short distance off the shore, these stacks of rocks look like stacks of pancakes! The way the rocks have formed in layers gives the pancake effect! It makes for beautiful views and a dramatic landscape. It certainly looks like the Great Ocean Road in Australia, with its fantastic, rugged scenery and how after every corner there is a new and more dramatic view!

After Greymouth, (the big smoke of the west coast!?!) our next stop was the town of Hokitika, which was not much bigger than a large village at home. It is where most of New Zealand's greenstone (jade, as we would say at home) comes from, so there are several jade factories to wonder around and the National Kiwi Bird Centre. Apart from that, there was little to see here, but what made up for that was our campsite - right beside a lake out in a nearby forest, surrounded by mountains. The views around the campsite were wonderful and luckily, that night we had a clear sky, so we could see millions of stars through our sunroof as we went to sleep.